Rich Media and SEO

We often encourage Partners to optimize their clients’ listings as fully as possible. A big part of that process involves including rich media in a meaningful way — the Enhanced Content we often push Partners to have their clients to submit.

Over the last year, we’ve made improvements to the Yext platform to make gathering Enhanced and Rich Content easier than ever before. However, we know that a lot of clients don’t understand how impactful these items make their listings. To that end, this article is about the edge that adding rich media — specifically, optimized rich media — can be for a listing.

Recently, BrightEdge released a report about the impact of search on discoverability. We already covered the main part of the article, but there was a great nuance that BrightEdge wrote more extensively about: the CTR lift that comes from having rich media attached to your search engine result.

Images: The Ultimate Must-Have

Per BrightLocal, images can have a higher CTR than the same relatively-positioned search engine result. This means that if the image search results appears in Position 8 rather than a text-link, the images are more likely to be clicked.

How do you use this to your advantage? Search engines crawl images (and their meta-data) just as they crawl the websites for text content. This means that you can have images tied to your clients’ pages that push users through and return a good CTR without having to use keyword-stuffing or other tactics of dubious impact.

Google has provided a number of tips for using (and optimizing) images in websites. The main points boil down to simple tenets that have been true since the dawn of the internet era:

• Pictures are Worth (Not Composed of) a Thousand Words — Don’t embed important text in a picture. The picture/graphic should serve as an illustration of the information being conveyed. It should not itself be the entirety of the information on the page. While Google makes increasingly large strides in computer vision, we still have to have humans checking their work just to be sure. Don’t bury important / search-friendly content in images.
• Use the alt Attribute — The alt attribute for images provides accessibility for vision-impaired persons using screen reader and other accessibility technology. It’s also a great place for you to place important, descriptive information about an image. This information will be crawled and used to improve search rank in many instances. Beware keyword-stuffing — this is easily detected and may yield a penalty. Plus, it creates a more negative user experience.
• High Quality or Bust — It’s an obvious point but it’s worth repeating: use high-resolution, well-composed images to illustrate your clients’ business, especially if they’re a restaurant or bar, or any other such “social” business. Many potential customers scope out such businesses before patronizing them, and it’s worth having images that depict the business both honestly as well as flatteringly that you or your client controls rather than relying on user-submitted content.

BrightLocal also points out that there is Schema markup specifically for images. While you can’t attach this information to the image through Yext, you can (and should) include this information when putting these images on the client’s website.

Video: The Untapped Resource

Video, according to some June 2014 Google insights, seems to have a lesser lift impact overall. However, for specific use cases, video proves incredibly powerful. One doesn’t have to look hard to find examples of product demos that went viral. For verticals such as: contractors, hairdressers, make-up artists, music lessons, etc., video can prove an extremely powerful way of developing an audience while also demonstrating your client’s skills and professionalism to a potential audience.

Much of the same advice we applied to images applies to video:

• Use as high quality/resolution of video as possible.
• Take advantage of Schema and alt tags.
• Ensure that the description is descriptive and not a nonsensical series of keywords.

However, other nuances exist that are unique to video:

• Don’t Use Flash — Flash is increasingly less supported, as more and more video shifts to the HTML5 video format. Avoid Flash if possible by hosting on YouTube (a video type Yext supports in its platform, by the way!) which also allows you to easily share videos to Google+ and other Google products.
• Mind the Length — Increasingly, we see that people’s attention to video wanes after 30 seconds. Bear this in mind as you develop videos for various types of consumption. A more in-depth subject matter (e.g. a how-to, walkthrough, etc.) will require a longer length, but a more casual video (e.g. an introduction, Q&A, etc.) should be kept as concise as possible.
• Use CTAs Cleverly — YouTube allows you to include clickable message flags called annotations. These can be links, dismissed, appear/disappear by timing, and more. You can use these on YouTube videos to enhance the viewer’s call to action imperative. Especially in how-to or explanatory videos, you can use these flags in lieu of text on-screen that was added in production. For more information about using annotations, check out this post from Search Engine People.

User Experience is Key

Ultimately, rich media content is intended to enhance and improve the content already on the page. If your clients’ websites aren’t already a space with information and genuine, original content, adding images and video may not have the impact you’re hoping for.

However, the Yext platform makes managing and uploading these digital assets easy and consistent. The more rich media you have associated with your clients’ consistent, numerous listings, the better off your client will be, and the better ROI you can demonstrate to them.